The New York Times Has Made a Bot to Improve Your Wordle Game

Finally! There’s now a more accurate way to measure your Wordle skills than simply sharing your results in the group chat. The New York Times has just launched WordleBot, the official companion app to the daily word guessing game that analyses your attempts and gives you tips to improve.

How to use WordleBot:

WordleBot is actually a standalone site and not a plugin or extension you can add to the page where you play Wordle. To use WordleBot, first you have to solve the day’s Wordle. With that solved, go to WordleBot here and you’ll see a full breakdown of your game.

Here you’ll be given ratings out of 100 for your skill (“Did you minimise the expected number of turns it would take to solve the puzzle?”), luck (“Did your guesses eliminate more solutions than expected?”) and the number of steps it took you to complete today’s puzzle.

The next page is where WordleBot really gets interesting, though. Click through to the right and the bot will “examine your puzzle and tell you what, if anything, I would have done differently. Words I especially recommend are marked with my seal of approval. And, if you’re curious, I’ll show you the math behind my recommendations.”

WordleBot gives your opening word a rating out of 100 and suggests alternatives that might give you more clues from your next first guess. It goes on ranking each guess and gives you a bit of context about what you achieved with each word, like whether a particular word greatly narrowed down the pool of possible solutions or if there was a more efficient word you could have used instead.

Finally, WordleBot compares your solution with its and shows you the words side-by-side. This is great if you solved it quickly, but can be pretty demoralising if you messed up today’s puzzle.

So, What’s the Best Starting Word in Wordle?

Thanks to WordleBot, we now have confirmation that “crane” is the best word to open with if you’re playing in Normal Mode, while “dealt” is the best opening if you’re playing in Hard Mode.

The Times confirmed it in a post introducing WordleBot, but added that “the perfect opening word for a computer isn’t necessarily the perfect opening word for you. WordleBot has perfect knowledge of the 2,309 solutions stored in its memory. It’s likely that you do not. So while the bot might know the precise optimal path to take from a given guess, it’s possible that you might not and that a different guess would be more likely to lead you to the answer.”